Today's computer application programs are distributed in nature, relying on one or more networked computers to complete an assortment of computing tasks. One of the great challenges to information technology (IT) professionals, when measuring computer and application performance, is understanding the complex and sometimes dynamic interconnections between the various pieces of the computer application and their residence on various computing nodes.
To do this, most IT professionals rely on diagrams depicting application program interconnections. However, these diagrams are often inaccurate and out of date. The IT professionals also ask several IT individuals to piece together these connections from their recollections. However, experience has shown that these recollections are often wrong. What is needed is a way to dynamically detect and generate representations of the complex interconnections of application programs in a network environment in a programmatic way.
Conventional dynamic topology tools available in the IT workplace today fail to do this. In particular, most dynamic topology tools seek out and detect hardware interconnections such as a router that is found between computers. These types of tools target a more simplistic problem of asset management (understanding what hardware is in the network), and not of application topology (which is hardware independent).
Application topology defines how computer processes within hardware computers interact with other processes on the same and remote networked computers. An understanding of the application topology allows proper maintenance of pieces of the application programs in the network. For example, if an application is running slowly, the application topology is used to identify all pieces of the application that reside on the various remote computers, so that those application pieces can be examined. However, conventional tools are unable to display the application topology. Instead, they identify hardware components in the distributed computing environment, without identifying application processes that are being executed by the hardware components.